🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <511@mtxinu.UUCP> tim@mtxinu.UUCP (Tim Wood) writes:
>Re: the "I've been raped" joke
>
>Let's dissect this joke here, as there seem to be people in 
>news-land who either don't understand it or see the humor in it.
>I do this because this will relate in an interesting way to the sender.
>
>The woman claims to have been raped when she has found that her newly-
>aquired $50 bill is counterfeit.  This implies that the bill was payment
>for sexual favors, i.e., the woman is a prostitute.  It also implies
>that she performed the "service" willingly because she believed she
>was being compensated, but when she finds that she wasn't, she is
>retroactively withdrawing her consent for the completed act, because
>she wouldn't have performed willingly had she realized she wouldn't be
>compensated.
>

So far so good.

>Now the joke is thoroughly de-humored.  Why the analysis?  To determine
>at whose expense the joke is made, and why.  The joke satirizes woman's 
>right to withdraw consent for sexual relations. 

No - it satirizes this one individual woman for her idea that she could
retro-actively withdraw consent. Anybody who thinks that retro-active
denial is ridiculous should not identify with this woman, and therefore
not be offended.

>>The woman looks like
>a fool because she gave away her body on a condition that was not met.

No more so than a merchant who takes a bad check. She looks the fool
because she thinks she's been raped, not because someone's taken
advantage of her.

>I will speculate that chances are that someone who has innate concern
>for this society and its long-held bias against the word of women 
>claiming rape will not find this joke funny, nor would it occur to
>him/her to tell it.

I thought it funny, all of the women to whom I've told it thought it
was funny (some less than others, but nobody was offended - then again
I didn't tell it to any prostitutes). And I and all these women have innate
concern blah-blah-blah, so I guess your speculation just might be 
unfounded, eh?

>
>
>-Tim Wood
>...{decvax}!ucbvax!mtxinu!sybase!tim
>These opinions are at least my own.

	--MKR